'To Carve & Chisel'

On gender-affirming legality, resistance, and Texas's new anti-trans policy

Delivering testimony as a trans folk singer against SB 14 during Texas’s Special Legislative Session last year

I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails...

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Last night, I found out about Texas’s newest anti-trans policy the same way I find out about all of Texas’s anti-trans policies: while scrolling Instagram, trying to book a new tour. In the middle of researching trans folk bands in Detroit, I stumbled across a post about a new fucked up policy on KUT’s page. Panicked, I started flipping through all my regulars: Equality Texas, Lambda Legal. They all said the same thing.

The handiwork of Attorney General Ken Paxton, this new policy — which rolled out yesterday — dictates that the 93,000+ trans people living in Texas will no longer be allowed to change the gender marker on our driver’s licenses, unless it’s to fix a “clerical error.” Any request to update a gender marker on our driver’s licenses will be recorded. According to Equality Texas, DPS has also decided it will no longer honor court orders for gender markers at all, in spite of them being legal documents that are still accepted at banks, libraries, and post offices. If your documentation includes a name change, that also will not be honored.

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

Here’s the thing. I’m not a journalist. I’m not an authority. I’m not even the smartest guy in the room.¹ I can’t write a blistering exposé about trans rights in the South, and seeing as I can’t even read a clock, I’m not gonna attempt to do deep dives on data evaluation, either. I won’t give you statistics about suicide rates in the trans community when we don’t have access to the resources we need, or about homicide rates against trans people; you can Google those, they’re all anyone talks about in the media anyway.

But it matters to me to talk about this topic somehow. Not only am I intimately familiar with the process and ramifications of legally changing my identity information, I also think that people sometimes underestimate what limiting name and gender marker changes can do. As if it’s sad, but small. Or maybe people don’t give it much thought. After all, who tracks how many times a day you have to prove who you are legally?

In the end, I’m a folk singer. All I can do is give you myself, and the lessons I’ve learned from people much smarter than me² about how to endure anti-trans attacks like this.

So here’s what I know.

Me in 2023 at Minnehaha Falls, just after finding out that my name change was approved while I was on tour

I.

Before I was Carter, I was Bridget.

Because I got that name while on my deathbed — I was born with a hole in my heart — and then quite suddenly recovered, my parents placed a lot of weight on my birth name, as if the name was an amulet; as if St Brigid herself had come down on a heavenly cloud to my little premie tube and healed up the muscle. Because my name meant so much to my parents, I spent most of my life dissociating whenever someone said that name. I leaned into nicknames: “Bridge-o,” “Bridgie,” “Ratboy,” whatever I could get. I forbade lovers from calling me anything. I figured everyone felt weird and bad when somebody said their name. Over time, that bad feeling revealed other bad feelings about what I was pretending to be in the name of family. I figured I’d spend the rest of my life half-miserable and then die early.

Estranging myself from my family was the first step to seeing my way out of psychological death.

Becoming Carter Hogan, first socially and then legally, was the second. It took me from my baby deathbed until I was 34 years old to see it all through, and I do believe, with everything in my body, that becoming Carter — and thus, stepping into transness — is one of the most divine things I’ve ever done.

It was also costly.

II.

To become Carter legally, I had to apply for a legal name change. In Texas, that process often takes 6 to 12 months, can cost several hundred dollars,³ and can ultimately be denied if you get the wrong judge or don’t write a “convincing” enough argument. I got lucky: I made it through the Gender Affirmation Project’s waitlist and, with their help, my name change was finally approved about a year after I started the process — and it didn’t cost me a dime.

I found out in an email while on tour in Minneapolis. I went to Minnehaha Falls, the “laughing waters,” and screamed my name into the mist. I was so happy.

Ken Paxton and his ilk would like this process to remain as opaque as possible. For me, that meant that, alongside working several jobs and booking my own shows and tours and dealing with various health problems and preparing for a hysterectomy, I had to find out how to change the legal information on my driver’s license by trial and error. For example, the email you receive with your judge-signed pdf doesn’t mention that said pdf won’t be accepted by the DMV. So you might book an appointment at a DMV a few counties over, because that’s the only one with appointments available, and then drive an hour and a half only to get there and wait for 2 more hours and then get told that, actually, this pdf doesn’t count, and you have to go get your official documents from a government building — but we can’t tell you which one, who knows! Next!

Reader, in case you’re trans in Austin, please know: it’s the Travis County District Clerk’s office. It’s downtown on Guadalupe by the old central library.

Defeated and tired, I went to the Travis County District Clerk’s office and checked in at a computer, then leaned on a tall table in the cavernous room to wait my turn. The A/C had turned this floor into an ice box; my sweat dried quick, made me feel colder than was reasonable on a 99 degree day. A man with a briefcase, when called, said loudly, “It’s my third divorce, man, can’t you ring me up any quicker?” Behind the glass shield of the counter, clerks stamped document after document, and the sound echoed against all the marble. I’d worn an old KN95 that day and the fabric kept getting sucked into my mouth every time I took a breath. I waited, panted, shivered, waited.

At last, my new name was called. A thrill, to be Carter in public. I walked up to the clerk’s window.

“What do you need, honey,” said the clerk. Miguel,⁴ read his rainbow name tag. His nails were painted dark blue with a glittering topcoat, and he’d plunged a rainbow flag into the pen cup to the right of the window.

Underneath my mask, I sighed with relief.

That day, I was served by the gay clerk who signed the very first marriage certificate issued to a gay couple in Texas in 2015: Sarah Goodfriend and Suzanne Bryant, who’d been together for 30 years. “I made the other clerks let me do it,” he said, flashing me a grin: “I wasn’t gonna let a straight do a gay’s work.” While he plugged in all of my court order information, Miguel told me he loved working at the District Clerk’s office because he wanted to help our community by being a kind face in an otherwise hostile environment. When my 3 copies of my court order finished printing, he said he’d stamp and seal all of them for me. “You don’t need a seal, it’s still legal without it, but everybody in this state loves something they can touch, so this will make everything a lot easier for you.”

Then he handed me my copies. We shook hands.

“Good luck out there, Carter,” said Miguel.

I cried so hard in the elevator that I soaked my mask. I’m crying typing this now.

III.

Here’s how a DMV visit for a legal name and gender marker change used to go:

You can’t take coffee into a DMV, no matter how early your appointment. You can’t eat food in a DMV, no matter how long your appointment runs. You must make an appointment, and most of those book out months in advance so you’ll probably have to schedule one at a DMV that’s pretty far away. But you should also know that, even though you’ve made an appointment, you have to get there as early as you can because they might be running early, and you must plan on having to stay later than you’d like because they’ll definitely be running late if they’re not running early. You should know that, when you get to the DMV at last with your stamped and sealed court order in hand, there will be a long line that winds around the building outside in the direct Texas sun, because even checking in is an arduous process.

Once you’re inside and in front of a DMV worker, take off your mask. People in Texas often treat you as less than human if you’re wearing a mask.

Pray that you don’t have to endure the snide comments of a very Christian worker. Pray that the very Christian worker isn’t feeling spiteful that day, doesn’t notice what you’re doing, or doesn’t actually understand trans stuff and so acts like it was all a big mistake: “How funny! What a whoopsie!”

If you’re charming, you can try to charm them, but it’s often best to just nod your head when they complain and keep your mouth shut.

Take your photo. Thank the worker. Leave.

Now get on with changing your legal information everywhere else.

Unbelievable that as of last night, that nightmare of a process has somehow gotten worse.

Just a tiny future Carter trying to enjoy his goddamn Easter eggs in peace

IV.

Bartenders, banks, doctors, airport security, the pick-up line at CVS, landlords, jobs: so much depends / upon / that little plastic card / made by a government / that fucking hates you. To change the information on that little card represents hours and hours of work. You do that work outside the jobs you take to pay your rent and buy groceries. You do that work knowing that cis people who get married and change their names don’t have to do half of what you’re doing. You project manage your way to leaving dysphoria behind, but it involves some of the hardest project management I’ve ever seen, so it’s no wonder that so many trans folks have to abandon the process halfway through. Like getting affordable housing or medical treatment or a green card, changing your gender marker and your name can be a life-saving action that has been made excruciatingly, sometimes life-threateningly, difficult. If you’ve ever been incarcerated, it’s even harder.⁵

But still. Less than 3 days ago, in Texas, you could do it. 3 days ago, you could go through all of that and know that when you looked down at your ID, it would reflect something a little closer to how you feel every day.

Now, you can’t.⁶

V.

When violent governments, particularly ones in the southern United States, make anti-trans policies, I often observe an uptick in anti-South rhetoric. “You should just move,” people say — as if leaving behind one’s community and the land they love is so affordable, or simple. “Another stupid move by Texas,” people say — as if the entire state of Texas makes these decisions, and not a few supremely fucked up white people in power who are backed by corporations and the rich. “Well, that’s the South,” people say — as if the South always deserves what it gets.

I think people mean to be expressing solidarity with Southerners when they say things like that, as if sharing exasperation is what’s needed. As if ragging on one’s state is a way to join in.

I wasn’t born and raised in Texas. I moved to Texas by choice. I’ve got 12 years of living in Austin under my belt, broken only by a brief stint of grad school and then a year living in Mexico City. I moved back to Texas again, by choice. The real truth of it all is that, no matter where I go, I love Texas, and I love the South, even with all its dark and complicated histories and presents — precisely because those dark and complicated histories and presents are filled also with hope and with revolution.⁷ I have been radicalized again and again and again by the poets, activists, musicians, historians, union workers, and community members who show up over and over again, in spite of the gerrymandering, in spite of voter suppression, in spite of the ways that white people in power carved Austin into segregated neighborhoods that are now being gentrified to fuck.

Last spring of 2023, I spent hours and hours alongside other trans people sitting in legislative sessions at the Capitol building in Austin, fighting as hard as we could to stop several anti-trans bills from going through. I delivered testimonies alongside Brad Pritchett of Equality Texas and friends from OutYouth and a trans teenager whose voice shook the whole time and Bobby Pudrido, an incredible drag king who became a friend. I spent 14 hours in a run-off room with sweeties and friends waiting to deliver testimony that was ultimately denied. When our friend Loren organized a die-in after those 14 hours, invoking the history of ACT UP’s die-ins during the AIDS crisis, we put our bodies on the ground, beat our hands against pillars, screamed and chanted while the Texas National Guard pointed guns at our heads. Friends were assaulted for peacefully protesting. Friends set up Free Fridges all over the city. Friends put up NARCAN trainings and self-defense trainings for trans performers through Primrose Harm Reduction. Friends made each other meals. Friends got each other hormones.

“I am an act of kneading,” wrote queer Chicana activist and Texan Gloria Anzaldúa, “of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.”

Texas: a place where shapeshifters thrive, where communities work in tandem, where we fail and try and fail and try. It’s no wonder Texas has stuck to me, like a burr or a cactus thorn.

VI.

From GAP and Miguel and Equality Texas and OutYouth and all my friends and community members and the long lineage of activists and poets who come before me, who stay in this work, here is what I have learned:

This new policy isn’t good. It sits in a long line of anti-trans legislation that will only get worse the closer we get to election season. It’s a policy that intentionally makes it so, so much harder for trans Texans to live a dignified life. It’s similar to other policies rolling out right now in Kansas, Florida, and Montana. Ian Pittman, an Austin-based family law practitioner, said in an interview with KUT that he’s worried Ken Paxton is trying to finish the work he started in 2022 of creating a database of trans Texans. Truly, what Ken Paxton and the attorney generals of Kansas, Florida, Montana, and any other state that join them aim to do with that information is unclear, and terrifying.

This policy is also directly related to COVID as a mass-disabling event, to the genocide in Gaza that persists while Debra Messing throws a fit about Bisan Owda getting an Emmy nomination, to the complete erosion of public health, to union-busting, to the families kept in cages at the Texas-Mexico border, to the murder of Sonya Massey and cop violence everywhere…

Everything is connected to everything. Which means two things.

1: As long as there has been violence and oppression, there have been people fighting for dignity and freedom.

2: It is never too late to join us.

By pure coincidence, my own name change paperwork is sitting on the blue kitchen table right next to my computer as I type this essay. I’m about to send it to my bank so that I can, at long last, stop getting called Bridget every time I withdraw money from my checking account. To receive these documents took not just my hours of work and effort, but also the hours and work of strangers and friends, of kind clerks and pro-bono lawyers; it took loss and gain, suffering and triumph. I am not the first to fight for them. I am not the only one to fight for them.

And, in spite of everything, I will not be the last.

Notes:

1. That’s probably Chase Strangio, for my money.

2. Austin poet-activist KB Brookins writes so beautifully about being trans and Black in Texas, among many other topics, and has taught me so much. Their Substack, linked above, is a great follow.

3. UT Austin’s Gender Affirmation Project is always taking on new trans clients to assist with applications for legal name and gender marker changes. The wait list is long, but they’re super nice, very experienced, AND they help every single trans person apply for a fee waive because, in their words, “No trans person should pay for this shit, I don’t care how much money you make.” I worked with them and so did my partner. Big love to y’all at GAP!

4. Not his real name, I feel it’s important to mention, only because I don’t want some jagweed asshole using any article of mine to doxx a hero.

5. Though possible, and there are people to help. There are always people to help, somewhere.

6. If you’re a trans Texan and you’re in the process of legally changing your name and gender marker right now, contact the Lambda Legal help desk at lambdalegal.org/helpdesk.

7. There’s some dispute about whether Texas counts as the South or not. I’m not a born-and-raised Southerner so I often find that my perspective on this doesn’t — and maybe shouldn’t — count. Either way, it’s South for me, and thinking of Texas as the South has opened me to loving the entire South, so I’m grateful nevertheless for my possible (but well-meaning) miscategorization.